Study finds H1N1 virus spreads easily by plane

Viruses love plane travel. They get to fly around the world inside a closed container while their infected carrier breathes and coughs, spreading pathogens to other passengers, either by direct contact or through the air. And once people deplane, the virus can spread to other geographical areas. Scientists already know that smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, seasonal influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) can be transmitted during commercial flights. Now, in the first study to predict the number of H1N1 flu infections that could occur during a flight, UCLA researchers found that transmission during transatlantic travel could be fairly high. Reporting in the current online edition of the journal BMC Medicine, Sally Blower, director of the Center for Biomedical Modeling at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, along with Bradley Wagner and Brian Coburn, postdoctoral fellows in Blower's research group, used novel mathematical modeling techniques to predict in-flight transmission of the H1N1 virus. They found that transmission could be rather significant, particularly during long flights, if the infected individual travels in economy class.